It’s been almost a year since I wrote my post on how to model friction in a dynamic multibody system. Since then, I’ve reconsidered my ideas from the post a few times and finally found out that there’s a theory called “hybrid systems” that intersects with the problems described there.

Let’s assume you want to model a multibody system that includes friction. This seems like a quite reasonable idea to me and in this post, I’ll share what I’ve learned when doing exactly this in GNU Octave (or Matlab – doesn’t matter much since we’ll use quite basic functionality).